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UK consumers will be able to start using Apple Pay next month, the company has announced.
Although the full scale of support won’t be known for a few weeks, some companies have already pledged their backing, including Transport for London, Waitrose, McDonalds, Costa, Boots and M&S. A total of 250,000 locations will be ready to go in the UK at launch.
That was just one of the announcements to come from Apple’s WWDC 2015 keynote last night.
iOS 9 was certainly one of the other highlights. The new mobile OS is a gentle evolution of the current one, with some added functionality coming to a handful of default apps. Drawing is being added to Notes, for instance, while Newsstand will become simply ‘News’. There will also be some Google Now style updates for Siri, allowing it to be more pro-active by closely monitoring more aspects of your online activity.
Perhaps most importantly, iOS 9 will have a smaller memory footprint than iOS 8, keeping more of your hardware’s memory available for other use. iOS 9 will launch in the autumn.
Also on the way is OS X El Captain, which again promises some subtle revisions to the Mac experience, while Apple Watch will also be getting a big software update via WatchOS 2.
Perhaps the biggest reveal (it was even preceded on-stage by a Steve Jobs style one more thing”) was Apple Music. The streaming service will be a direct rival to Spotify, with a monthly subscription and curated playlists. There will also be a mechanism for unsigned bands to upload their tunes.
Arriving alongside is a new global radio station called Beats 1, which will be fronted by former BBC Radio 1 one man Zane Lowe. The vanilla price is $9.99 a month, although there’s also a $14.99 family plan for up to five people.
Apple Music will hit iOS on June 30th and, notably, Android in the autumn.
